The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture

So, I co-wrote an essay entitled “Your Humanity is In Another Castle” with @femfreq for the book “The State of Play”: http://t.co/PX0cpOYO11 — Katherine Cross (@Quinnae_Moon) March 25, 2015   @Quinnae_Moon @femfreq I am so pumped about this! Hello dissertation fodder! 😀 this would be a great @gamestudies101 ! #gamestudies101 — Emma Vossen (@emmahvossen) March…

Developer’s Dilemma

“Rank-and-file game developers bring videogames from concept to product, and yet their work is almost invisible, hidden behind the famous names of publishers, executives, or console manufacturers. In this book, Casey O’Donnell examines the creative collaborative practice of typical game developers. His investigation of why game developers work the way they do sheds light on…

The Scratchware Manifesto (2000)

“The machinery of gaming has run amok. Instead of serving creative vision, it suppresses it. Instead of encouraging innovation, it represses it. Instead of taking its cue from our most imaginative minds, it takes its cue from the latest month’s PC Data list. Instead of rewarding those who succeed, it penalizes them with development budgets…

Videogames are a Mess

“So much of videogame studies has been marked by a single question: ‘What is a game?’ “For a while now, our community has understood that “mark” as a curse or a blight—a scourge of formalism that drew, or perhaps still draws, our attention away from more important matters of meaning, reception, and use.” Curator: Michael…

Learning by Design

“So the question is: How do good game designers manage to get new players to learn long, complex, and difficult games? The answer, I believe, is this: the designers of many good games have hit on profoundly good methods of getting people to learn and to enjoy learning. They have had to, since games that were…

“You Have Unleashed a Horde of Barbarians!”

“We are about four or five years into the formation of a new discipline, digital game studies. Though by one account computer games have been around for more than four decades (Aarseth), and by another computer and video game sales in the United States are rivaling movie box office sales (Frauenfelder), academic attention to the…

Half-Real

“A video game is half-real: we play by real rules while imagining a fictional world. We win or lose the game in the real world, but we slay a dragon (for example) only in the world of the game. In this thought-provoking study, Jesper Juul examines the constantly evolving tension between rules and fiction in…

Extra Lives

“In Extra Lives, acclaimed writer and life-long video game enthusiast Tom Bissell takes the reader on an insightful and entertaining tour of the art and meaning of video games. Curator: Michael Hancock